Hi Kurlies,  

Have you ever felt unsupported? Maybe you saw someone else receiving support, resources, and guidance and wondered why you weren’t receiving the same. How did this lack of support impact your performance? Did you feel like the outcome would have been better had you received the support you needed? 

If you can relate to this, you might have experienced the Pygmalion effect: a psychological phenomenon wherein someone’s high expectations leads to improved performance in others, while someone’s low expectations leads to worse performance in others. 

To demonstrate this, imagine a high school basketball team. The coach gravitates to one player in particular. He pours guidance into this player, expects him to do well, and gives him lots of support. But there’s another player the coach doesn’t like as much. The coach isn’t mean to this player per-say, but he largely ignores him, giving him far less instruction overall. 

The player who receives the coach’s support believes he’s an excellent athlete in the making! Not only that, but his performance improves tremendously by the end of the season. The player who doesn’t receive the same attention second guesses himself and loses interest in basketball altogether. At the end of the year, the coach gloats in the fact that he nurtured the right player, but really, it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who knows what the other player could have achieved given the same care and guidance as the first. 

In meditation the other day, I realized the Pygmalion effect could be an amazing life hack. You see, on the surface it invokes a sense of powerlessness because it seems dependent on other people’s views of us. But what if we could create this phenomenon from within? By looking at life as a player and a coach, perhaps we can harness this effect to our benefit.

A Player Named Life

On one side of the coin, we coach a player named Life. So it’s worth asking: what do we expect from her? Do we treat her as the player we don’t expect much from? Sure, we would like to see her do well, but because we subconsciously have low expectations of her, we don’t offer her our full love and support. Then when she doesn’t do well, we feel comforted that we didn’t get our hopes up.

Or do we invest in Life as if she’s our beloved star player? We identify her weaknesses and give her resources to make her strong. We give her time to practice without holding her in contempt. When she’s clumsy, we show her grace. When she’s unfocused, we encourage discipline. We show her how to meet pain, how to sit with it, and how to let it go. 

We expect her to be an all-star and give her the support she needs to be one.  

A Coach Named Life

Flip the coin and Life is our coach. Not only that, but we can see her in any way we wish. Is she an apathetic coach who doesn’t really care? Or maybe she’s worse - a psycho who enjoys our suffering. How we view her is entirely up to us.

I’m learning to see life as a benevolent coach who loves me, but takes me through drills because she knows they make me excellent. She challenges me, makes me run up and down the court, and shoot layup after layup. Yes, it’s hard and sometimes even painful - but breaking through to a joyful and peaceful consciousness is worth it. Isn’t joy and peace what we all really want anyway?

Think about it. We want aaallllllll the things in order to feel what? Joy and peace.  

Enjoying the Game 

When Life gets challenging, I turn to miracle-mindedness. Miracle-mindedness is a perspective that says good things are here and more good things are coming. It is expecting the best possible outcome and accepting it might look completely different from our expectations. It’s understanding that there’s a timeline, and sometimes life just has to play out. 

So how do we activate miracle-mindedness? Personally, I close my eyes, press my palms together in front of my heart (known as prayer hands in the West, but also known as the powerful Anjali Mudra in the East) and say aloud: 

Thank you for your miracles.

I repeat those words over and over, and when I do, I feel a tingling sensation all over my body. That’s my personal cue that the miracles are activating, but your cue may feel a little different. Some days, I even get a good list going, saying: 

Thank you for your miracles in my mind, physical body, energy body, and emotional body. Thank you for your miracles in my relationships. Thank you for your miracles with my partner and my relationship with my partner. Thank you for your miracles with my mom, dad, and family. Thank you for your miracles with my job and everyone I interact with professionally. Thank you for your miracles with my friendships. Thank you for your miracles with this planet and everyone on it.

And once I feel the list is complete, I open myself up to all of the best possibilities, knowing I have zero clue what those are. Sometimes the best outcome is for things to go my way and sometimes the best outcomes is that they don’t. All I can do is keep my miracle-mindedness, activate this divine form of law attractions through gratitude, and know that great cosmic support starts from within. 

xoxo,

Lana

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